March 15 - 17, 2019

Architectures That Bend But Don't Break

Saturday - Mar 16 11:00 AM
- WINCHESTER

Matt Stine

Global CTO - Software Architecture at Pivotal

All software architectures have to deal with stress. It’s simply the way the world works! Stressors come from multiple directions, including changes in the marketplace, business models, and customer demand, as well as infrastructure failures, improper or unexpected inputs, and bugs. As software architects, one of our jobs is to create solutions that meet both business and quality requirements while appropriately handling stress.

We typically approach stressors by trying to create solutions that are robust. Robust systems can continue functioning properly in the presence of internal and external challenges, but they also have one or more breaking points. When we pass a robust systems known threshold for a particular type of stress, it will fail. When a system encounters an “unknown unknown” challenge, it will usually not be robust!

Recent years have seen new approaches, including resilient, antifragile, and evolutionary architectures. All of these approaches emphasize the notion of adapting to changing conditions in order to not only survive stress but sometimes to benefit from it. In this class, we’ll examine together the theory and practice behind these architectural approaches.

Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms, in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity. He is currently the Global CTO of Architecture at Pivotal, and spends much of his time advising IT leadership on the effective adoption of cloud-native architectures.